Cost of common cold is nothing to sneeze at

March 02, 2003|By Kim Norris, Knight Ridder Newspapers.

The common cold costs the U.S. economy $40 billion a year in treatments and lost workdays, according to a new study by the University of Michigan that appears to be the first to quantify the cost of the most commonly occurring illness in humans.

Based on a nationwide phone survey of more than 4,000 households, researchers found that cold sufferers visit the doctor more than 100 million times each year at a cost of at least $7.7 billion, Dr. A Mark Fendrick, lead author of the study.

But the biggest economic cost was in lost workdays, something people tend not to consider when weighing the cost of illness. Fendrick and his team estimated that parents miss an average of 126 million workdays to care for their sick children. They miss 70 million more because they are sick. The cost? $22.5 billion a year.

Those sick days, coupled with the lost productivity from employees who aren't performing at their peak because they don't feel well, amount to about 0.25 percent of the nation's total output as measured by gross domestic product, said Detroit-based Comerica Bank chief economist David Littmann.

And that's nothing to sneeze at. "That may not sound like a lot, but it is," Littmann said. "Alan Greenspan would give his whatever to get a quarter-point increase in GDP."

So why isn't more effort being put into curing the common cold? That's a good question, Fendrick said. Even though the costs associated with the common cold are far greater than those associated with such illnesses as asthma or congestive heart failure, the nation spends far less on ways to prevent and treat colds, he said.

He said he hoped the "snapshot on the total economic burden will hopefully help research agencies place this most common illness in man in the appropriate priority when allocating resources to research and development."

He added: "Cancer, diabetes and coronary heart disease appropriately receive very substantial research budgets. The next tier of illness, where hypertension, stroke and congestive heart failure are, is where we hope research dollars for common cold would fall."